


flowers by the sea

by orphan_account



Category: Free!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Insecurity, Love Confessions, M/M, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-20
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 09:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2647439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[ log for rinharu week ]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. firsts

**Author's Note:**

> this one is for ellie and effie (:
> 
> // day one: firsts

\--

 

 

Rin’s here for the weekend, eagerly steaming under the heat of Tokyo’s ripe summer. He’s exuberant, Haru notes, stirring around his tea out of the restless boredom that comes with wanting to do something but not knowing what to do. They’ve been sitting in his living room for two hours trying to figure out what to do without falling prey to the heat, and the fan is on high, and Haru’s starting to think that he’s finally outgrown his ability to evade heat.

“I’m thirsty,” Rin announces, and gets up to look in the refrigerator before Haru has a chance to do anything about it. He watches as Rin heads into the kitchen, measuring his silhouette to the one he remembers from a few months ago, and thinks that Rin maybe grew a little taller, filled out more in his shoulders.

Rin looks strong from the back, now. This hasn’t always been true: a year ago, even, his shoulders shook when he wasn’t paying attention to them, hunched over like he was trying to trap something into his chest cavity. A year ago, maybe, he looked strong from the front, all impassive face and calm voice, but there had been something restless twisting his spine.

Now he looks like a leader.

Haru wonders if he looks like a leader to Rin.

“Hello?”

“Oh.” Haru blinks and suddenly Rin is back at the table again, with a glass of cold juice.

“Didn’t know you had this stuff,” Rin says cheerfully, “you’re always ordering hot soup at restaurants, even in the middle of the summer.”

“Huh… I guess. Makoto comes over sometimes, and some of the guys on the team like my cooking, so…”

“You’re spacing out a lot, Haru. Didn’t think my visiting you would be that much of a shock.”

Haru frowns slightly. “It’s not.”

“You know, you’re always kind of looking out somewhere,” Rin continues, his fingers dancing along the glass where the water condensed from the cold. “The pool, usually. But sometimes the sky.” He stares at his juice, like he’s thinking about taking a sip. “You’re always looking out. Makes me wonder what you’re looking for.”

 _You_ , Haru thinks. _I was looking for you - always looking for you._

“But I kinda got good at looking after you. Or up to you, I guess, since you were always… before me. My goal.” Rin smiles, a quiet smile despite its brightness, like an early sunset. “My dream, I guess you could say.”

It’s the sun blistering in his eyes that makes him look pointedly down at the table, his brain working too fast. For some reason - good reason, he’d always thought - he always looked skywards for Rin. Like Rin was far away, further than he could reach. But no -

\-  Rin was always

behind him, wasn’t he?

Haru’s mouth opens. “Rin,” he starts, but the weight of his realizations crack the bridge of the name, and Rin stands up, throwing the rest of his juice down his throat like he doesn’t want to taste it.

“Come on, show me around Tokyo. Didn’t you and Makoto promise to take me to Disneyland?”

“It’s too hot outside,” protests Haru with an uncomfortable frown.

“The pool, then.”

“You can’t live at the pool all the time.”

“Wow. What _happened_ to you?”

Haru shrugs and hates himself for it.

“Hey.”

Rin takes a seat next to him this time, and brushes his fingers lightly across Haru’s forehead. His hands are too hot, sticky with heat, but Haru doesn’t shy away; it’s the first time Rin’s touched him since they hugged at the airport, and that was so quick, so fleeting, that he doesn’t remember it very well through the crowd and the roar and echo of the large space.

“It’s just me,” Rin points out, but that’s exactly it -

“I know,” Haru says, his eyebrows knitting. He takes Rin’s wrist into his hand and stares at it, perplexed. Rin has pretty fingers, usually spread wide like his arms. Now they’re curled loose against the inside of his wrist, deceptively long and slender. “I...you…”

He’s not getting the right words, and it frustrates him; the more he thinks about them, the fuzzier they become, until the wall clears up and all that’s left is _Rin_ , not just surface-level Rin with his big smile and stupidly big heart and his broad shoulders, but something deeper, an undercurrent of sharp metal stringing his veins into place. Making the blood flow right.

“I know somewhere we can go,” he says, while Rin quietly watches him. He tries for a smile and feels it falter. “I… go there sometimes. By myself, sometimes. My captain took us there a few weeks ago to - relax.”

“Okay,” Rin agrees. The look on his face is so, so soft. “Of course.”

-

On the train, Haru leans a little into Rin’s shoulder and takes steady breaths and lets the familiar jolt-glide-jolt motion of the cart lull him into a haze. The sun sighs hot against the nape of his neck until Rin takes off his cap and sets it backwards on his head.

When did Rin become so thoughtful?

“You’re gonna get an embarrassing sunburn,” Rin mutters as they enter a tunnel.

Only the sharpness of his profile gets light, and the glimmer in his eyes look almost liquid when Haru gazes at him sleepily.

“Thanks, Rin,” he says, wishing for the churning in his stomach to stop.

-

The beach beyond the Sangaoka stop emerges like an oasis from the tidy streets slashing across the city. Haru feels better when the salt in the air clears his head, and better again when he sees the sea rolling in towards the sand.

“So where -”

“Hayama-Isshiki beach,” Haru says before Rin can ask properly. The tug of the tide draws him closer, so he grabs onto Rin’s hand and pulls him along.

“It’s nice,” Rin comments, looking around.

“It reminds me of you,” Haru tells him before he loses his nerve. Rin’s eyebrows lift in surprise before he smiles warmly against the cool sea breeze.

Haru likes the beach here because it reminds him of home: Iwatobi, sunset after sunset along the water, slow walks home with Makoto, the calm of simply taking one step after another, looking out into the marble swirl of clouds and sky and water. He likes the beach here because it reminds him of something else, too, something softer, a slow waltz, warmth hidden in a wind. It reminds him of another beach, far across an ocean.

He still remembers the way Rin looked at him that time, everything that was pointed and sharp and demanding of him softened by the sand and the sea.

He breathes.

“I… missed you,” he says.

Behind him, the water splashes. Rin’s face, bathed in the blue light of the sky, looks like sunrise.

“I missed you too, Haru.” Haru wants to laugh when red blooms across his face like flowers. “You seriously made me sit on that train for over an hour just to say that to me?”

“Not really.” It feels like he’s just walked a tightrope across an absurdly short distance - two steps, and he’s on the other side, safe, looking back and wondering what he was so tense about altogether. The distance is short enough that someone could have pulled him upright if he stumbled. “There’s something else I want to talk to you about.”

“H… really?”

How Rin can be so - so _grown up_ , and so childish at the same time has Haru dizzying himself trying to figure it all out.

“Earlier, when you said you wanted to see the pool,” Haru says after a moment, “there… was a reason I said no.” Rin looks surprised, but Haru breathes in the air of the sea and continues, the sudden rush of words leaving him lightheaded. “I think I hit a wall.”

He can tell by the way Rin’s expression tightens that something is twisting inside of him, and it wrenches a heavy thing into his gut, but then Rin’s shoulders relax and he laughs and reaches out and snatches his cap back to ruffle Haru’s hair.

“That’s what you’re worried about?”

“It’s serious,” Haru says, and then bites his lip.

“I’m not saying it’s not serious. But you can still swim, can’t you?”

“Yes…”

“Then you just have to swim past it,” Rin says, after a pause. “I know you can, Haru.”

It’s perhaps the conviction that breaks the words out of him. No - _eases_. Eases the words out of him. Like rolling a carpet down the stairs, watching something unfurl, unable to stop it. Today they are red, blushing and blooming and bursting, a bleeding contrast to the calm of the water.

“What if I can’t,” Haru whispers.

It’s the first time he’s voiced it out loud, even to himself. The sea, with all its depth, makes him feel less hysterical about it.

“You can,” Rin tells him.

“I don’t know _how_.” Haru rubs his arms. The wind makes it feel like all the air around him has opened up, exposing him - all his flaws, everything - to the world. To Rin. He doesn’t look very much like someone Rin has always admired, now, struggling, his body full of conflict. “Everyone on my team… they’re much faster than I am.”

His mouth clamps shut. Now Rin knows, doesn’t he? That Nanase Haruka, rare as he is in Iwatobi, doesn’t stand out in the way Tokyo bustles itself through the day, glitters through the night. Now Rin knows that Haru isn’t something worth chasing after anymore - that all the flashy races, the relays from back home, they weren’t anything.

Caring about something like this _hurts_.

“Haru,” Rin says, “you know, I’m really happy you told me this.”

What?

“You’ve never talked this much before, so I was almost worried, but… I’m happy you trust me enough to tell me…” Rin pauses, his hands fumbling, red flowers still blossoming on his face. Then he shoves Haru playfully in the shoulder. It feels like getting slammed in the side by a truck, the surprise settling heavily into his body, knocking him a few steps away. Rin takes a step after him, just like he always does. “But what on _earth_ are you even talking about? You think that’s hitting a wall? Aren’t you getting faster?”

“I mean - I - m -”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I’m not someone you should look at as a goal,” Haru spits out. “I’m not a good -”

Role model? Leader? Swimmer? Dream?

“You’re right. You’re completely right. I don’t know what I was _thinking_ , trying to be like you.” Rin frowns angrily. “You’re such a goddamn _idiot_ if you think that’s why I love you!”

Haru freezes.

Rin looks a little taken aback, but he takes a deep breath and continues, without missing a beat, “Yeah, that’s right! I love you! I had a whole thing planned out on the plane, and now you’ve messed that up, how do you feel about that, Haru? Worse, right? _God_ , you think I’m going to leave you if you can’t swim faster than the fastest swimmers in this country, what, _two months into college_? What’s wrong with you?”

“Rin -”

“Aren’t you working hard, anyway? Don’t you still love swimming? Don’t you think that after having it easy for all those years, there’s finally something you have to _work for_? Welcome to the real world, Haru. You can’t just glide through life like you did before, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck in one place. By the way, that plan of mine? It involved Disneyland. What’s up with this _beach_? It’s not even in Tokyo -”

“Rin.”

“And you know what, Haru.” Rin stops talking for a second to peel his shirt up over his head and toss it into the sand. Haru gapes at him. “Do you remember when we were kids and I went - I left for Australia? And you and Makoto and Nagisa acted like it was the end of the world, or something. But now you’ve been there, haven’t you? Don’t tell me if you can fly over the ocean, you can’t swim across a pool.”

“Why did you take your shirt off?” Haru asks after a moment, his mind whirling with everything - the heat, the wind, the salt of the sea, sand creeping into his shoes. Rin, golden beside him, his eyes fierce, his hands clenched, chest and shoulders heaving. The sky, so close to the horizon that Haru feels like he can tip it out of balance with just his two hands.

“It was sticking weirdly to my arms,” Rin mumbles, subdued.

“Why did you say you love me?” Haru asks, and just like that, the tension ebbs out of Rin’s face.

“Because I do, dumbass,” he says. “And even if you think you’re not, _I_ think you’re the worthiest dream out there.”

And then Rin grabs the edges of Haru’s shirt and tugs it up over his head as well; Haru lifts his arms automatically, dazed with the feeling of having just been shot out of the hot springs, _Rin loves me_ -

“Even though you apparently have to stand by some body of water every time you say something serious, I still think you’re -”

_it’s always been this easy to love Rin, maybe that’s why -_

Haru presses his fingers against Rin’s mouth. “Please stop before you embarrass yourself more.”

Rin doesn’t even struggle much. “Yeah, you get the point, right?”

Haru nods.

Rin gives the tip of his index finger the tiniest lick, which causes Haru to pull his hand away like a whip and shove him.

They end up shoving each other back and forth, kicking off their shoes and trying to throw sand in each other’s faces until their stomachs hurt from laughing. Rin grabs Haru around by the neck and forces both of them bodily into the ocean, to Haru’s increasingly loud protests; they come up with hair stuck flat to their foreheads, gasping, and Haru squints through all the water dripping into his eyes and thinks this is the best day of his _life_.

They’re on a tiny beach with the city behind them, not even secluded - there’s a group of students a little further down, snapping pictures and playing volleyball - but when Haru hooks his arms around Rin’s neck it feels like he’s drawing the boundaries of the world, just like it always has.

“Rin, I love you,” he says, even though the sun is blinding his eyes and salt scrapes around his teeth from when he accidentally swallowed several mouthfuls of water. “Thank you.”

Rin smiles at him so happily that Haru actually laughs. “Yeah, I know. Anytime.”

-

On the water the sun sets more fluidly, Haru thinks, and then huffs to himself in amusement.

It’s still summer, so even with the onset of night, the air stays warm. They’re sitting on the beach waiting for their pants to mostly dry off when Rin turns to him and says, “Why don’t we just stay here all night?”

“What?”

“Can we stay here? There’s food and stuff back there, but I want to,” Rin licks his lips, nervous, “stay here a little longer.”

Haru considers it. “Let me know when you get hungry, then.”

“Yeah.”

Rin squeezes his hand and somehow that makes Haru fall in love even more. Instead of squirming about it, he squeezes back and smiles when Rin squirms.

Haru closes his eyes against the blush in the sky.

-

When he opens his eyes he’s freezing, and there’s something cold and kind of damp pressed into his shoulder. It’s dark outside, everything edged in silver from the moonlight, and overhead, beyond the neon glow of the city, in the darkness shines millions and millions of stars.

Haru tries to count them for a little bit, gets to about twelve before he looks back down and realizes that Rin’s pressed his nose into his skin and is sniffling in his sleep from the cold.

He shakes Rin awake. “Rin. Rin, get up.”

“H-huh? Haru?”

Haru digs around in Rin’s backpack and pulls out his phone. “Rin. It’s three in the morning.”

“ _What_?” Rin blinks furiously. “Shit.”

His stomach growls.

“I think we missed the last train,” Haru informs him blandly.

“No kidding.”

“I’m hungry,” Haru says as Rin’s stomach growls again. He rummages through Rin’s backpack to find three protein bars, a half-finished bottle of water, and -

“Condoms?”

“I didn’t think we’d be out this late at night,” Rin snaps, blushing. “Let’s just - split the food for now and figure out what we’re going to do, okay?”

“Pineapple,” Haru remarks casually, staring at the happy packet for a moment longer just to make Rin glare harder before tossing it back into the back pocket. “Okay.”

They eat in silence for a few moments before Rin speaks up again. “This is kind of romantic.”

“Really?” Haru asks.

“Like - sitting on the beach at night, without anyone else, looking at the stars with the person you lo-”

“- eating protein bars and being unable to use condoms.”

“Haru!”

Haru swallows his bite of food and leans in to give Rin a quick, raisin-almond flavored kiss.

“You have no sense of romance,” Rin mutters, but he’s smiling anyway - _he smiles a lot when we’re together_ , Haru realizes. “Anyway, what do you want to do for the next three hours?”

Haru thinks about it. About all the things he loves about Rin. He finds himself smiling too. “Sit here, with you.”

“That’s -”

“I’ll tell you a bedtime story.”

Rin starts protesting - “a three hour long bedtime story?!” - but Haru only nods. He’s sure that three hours will go by quickly, now that he’s with Rin, now that everything’s finally smoothing out. Rin relents, his eyes shining in the silver light, and he finds that it isn’t hard to lean his head on Rin’s shoulder and talk at all.

“Yeah. Once upon a time, there was…”

 

.

.

 

 **tbc**.


	2. what sort of sight are you seeing now / departures

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> real quick little day two thing.  
> // prompt was "what sort of sight are you seeing now?" + "departures"

 

 

“I’m at the gate,” Rin says over the phone. It’s three in the morning and the only reason Haru’s eyes are still open are because he feels like they’re peeled apart and stuck there with tape. He’s achingly sleepy, tossing his phone over and over in his hand waiting for Rin to call.

“Have a safe flight,” Haru tells him, and he hears Rin laugh quietly into his ear.

“Go to sleep, Haru.”

“I can sleep later.” He’s sitting on his bed, curled up against the wall in a way that’s terrible for his back, balancing a sketchbook on his knees. “Tell me what you see, Rin.”

“Hmm… I see a long window.”

“What else?”

“Lights. Everything looks kind of staticky. Uh, empty seats.”

Haru’s pencil floats across the page, leaves edges of things that could be pictures in its wake. Rin continues to describe the airport to him, softly, for the next twenty minutes, before Haru hears a calm voice announcing that the passengers will begin boarding, shortly. By then he has a half-shaded sketch of gate C-16 slipping from his knees onto his covers.

“Hey, Haru?”

“Hmm?”

“I need to board now.”

“Oh.”

“I miss you,” Rin’s voice is low, so tender that it bleeds into Haru’s chest. He wants to take the softness of the phrase, all its helpless vulnerability, and wrap it into the warmth of his jacket. Instead it curls around his forehead, gentle, eases his tired eyelids closed.

“I miss you, too,” Haru says, and lets out a huge yawn. “Good night, Rin.”

-

“The snow’s all melting away,” Rin says.

Haru stares at the canvas hanging next to his window. It’s a picture of a quiet neighborhood, townhouses in quiet blocks, roofs capped with snow that drips into the street. Some parts are sketched crudely, but the dimensions feel real to him. He shivers in the summer heat. “So it is.”

“I put on different socks this morning and no one even told me. They were even like - half-matched.”

Haru smiles a little. “Who’s the one that lectured Nagisa up and down about balling his socks up after doing the laundry? What happened to that?”

“I was in a hurry! Besides, no one does that here. And I haven’t lost any of my socks.”

“I’ve lost three,” Haru tells him.

“That sucks, Haru.”

“I don’t mind yet. We can go sock shopping next time you’re here.”

“Can’t go sock shopping without me, huh? I guess it can’t be helped. I’m the sock expert of your heart, after all,” Rin’s voice sounds bright and lively.

“The sock expert?” Haru snorts a little.

“Sock shopping is serious business, Haru.”

“You sound like Nagisa.”

“I do _not_ sound like Nagisa. If I was Nagisa I’d call you Haru-chan, for starters.”

“...but you won’t,” Haru says after a pause.

“Of course not. Hey, is it weird? It’s still hot up there, right?”

“It’s not weird,” Haru decides, staring out into the clear blue sky. “I’m with you.”

-

“You’re gonna be so jealous of the pool here,” Rin says, his voice a comfortable bridge between smug and excited. “They’re so _pretty_. And majestic. Even the benches on the side are pretty. And I can see the ocean.”

“And the people?” Haru asks, his pencil busy.

“Didn’t think you would want to know about the people as much,” says Rin.

“People make things feel more alive.”

The rush of static in Rin’s sigh comes through like fairy dust. “Are you drawing?”

“Of course I am.”

“Okay. So at three o’clock there’s a kid whose speedo is kind of crooked, unfortunately, so I can sort of see his -”

“Rin.”

“I’m telling it like it is!”

-

Missing Rin gets easier, sometimes, when Haru flips through the pictures he’s drawn. At first Rin just went with vague descriptions, like a house painted pale green, or “a leafy road”, “something with trees,” but as Haru got better at details, so did Rin.

It’s easy to miss Rin when he’s hunched over his keyboard, when Rin tells him pictures and he draws them, and then they talk calmly about things like the view from the window, the branch on the tree that threatens to poke through. They talk about it so casually that it really feels like Rin is with him, close enough to touch, to feel the heat of his chest.

But sometimes it’s hard to miss Rin, when the tiny ache becomes an uncomfortable tightening in his stomach, leaves him curled around a pillow trying to smell the scent of Rin, fresh lavendar or pineapple or whatever he used and only finding the scent of clean laundry. It’s hard to miss Rin when he sees canvases empty of him, when evening edges out into something darker, and the hollowness on the roof of his mouth becomes something bigger.

Usually when that happens Haru sits in his kitchen with the light on, looking over his training regimens and telling himself that he can’t waste time when he could be conditioning instead.

Sometimes, once, he called Makoto up, and listened to Makoto tell him funny stories about captains’ meetings with Rin back in high school until he fell asleep.

Sometimes he wanders up and down the length of his bedroom, wishing Rin would materialize every time he turned around.

In the morning he might shoot Rin a message on their IM client, his heart only settling a little when Rin messages him back, just like he promised he would.

-

“What about you, Haru?” Rin asks him one day. He looks thoughtful.

“Hm?”

“What about you, what do you see all the time?”

Haru considers this question. He finds himself considering Rin’s questions with increasing gravity these days, and wonders if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe he just misses him too much.

“You have the same look on your face as when you’re trying to decide which jammers to choose,” Rin says through the monitor. Haru glares at him.

“It depends on how I feel that day,” he says coolly.

“Yeah, yeah. I get it. Don’t ignore my question.”

“I’m not, I’m just…” Haru looks around the room. Thinks. “You,” he finally decides.

“Me?”

“You,” Haru nods.

Rin’s blush looks ridiculous on vidcam, but Haru likes it anyway.

They keep talking, about classes and swimming and this new bakery that opened up recently on Rin’s street and a new seaweed that Haru discovered recently to put in his various mackerel dishes. Haru’s mind starts racing.

-

It gets easier to deal with missing Rin, these days.

When Haru wakes up in the morning, half an hour earlier than usual, he takes up his pencil and sketches it out. His room, half-lit from the rising sun. Shadows fuzzy. Lights glowing with the morning. He draws the folds of his blankets, the creases in his sheets. He even vaguely shades in a few posters on his walls, and the bookshelf on the opposite wall with picture frames on it.

Then he smiles, and pencils in a figure sitting at the edge of his bed, a strand of hair falling between his eyes in a way that’s feline in its elegance.

At lunch, he sits on campus and sketches out the contents of his bento, but with two pairs of chopsticks.

At practice, he stays after - not to swim, but to draw. He spends a lot of time sitting there, listening to the splashes of people coming in to practice their dives, their kicks. Every time he looks up he dreams of a flash of red.

He carries a bit of Rin with him wherever he goes. Scribbles Rin in the margins of his lecture notes. On napkins. When he has a day off at the beach, he scratches a serrated smile into the sand.

-

Haru puts together a care package for Rin. Not a lot of things fit into the box he has, but he manages to sneak in his sketchbook, Japanese snacks, some of the new seaweed he’s been buying. There’s a letter from Makoto, too. Haru puts that next to his own letter.

“I got something in the mail today,” Rin tells him a few days later, his words crunching over a mouthful of seaweed. “I wanted to open everything in front of you, but I got curious… and hungry.”

“It’s fine,” Haru says, mostly because Rin’s been away for the past few days, studying and swimming, and he thinks Rin can break out into AKB-48’s latest single, horrendously off-key, and it would still dissipate the ache in his chest. Perhaps replace it with another sort of pain, but a welcome one.

“I haven’t read the letters or looked through your sketchbook yet, though.”

“You can do that now, since I’m here,” says Haru. Rin does so, eagerly -

“Wow, is this a new sketchbook, Haru?” He flips open the first page. “Dear Rin,” he starts reading, looking up to grin at Haru’s mortified expression.

-

_Dear Rin,_

_You asked me, once, what kind of things **I** saw._

_It’s a little embarrassing, but the truth is, it’s always you._

_It’s hard to explain, so I just drew some pictures._

_I think you’ll find something familiar in all of them._

_By the way, Makoto says I can buy socks on the Internet with your face printed on them. Sounds pretty neat, right?_

_I miss you. You know that, right?_

_Haru_

 


	3. tempests created this tide

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for dicey and cherry , because i'm a nerd  
> // day three prompt - "you could have called"/reunion
> 
> this is fairly (extremely) canon divergent, and also stands alone as its own story.

 

 

So the tide of the sea rises one morning, and when the water peels back away from the sand, it leaves behind a child of the sunrise, tail glittering as red as dawn.

Haru is taking a walk along the beach while everyone else is asleep. He approaches the creature with the calmness that the early hour seems to imbue into anyone that experiences it and looks at the way the creature’s red hair fans out across pale skin, pale enough that the warm tone of cloud shadows look like bruises. There is a bruise shadow the size and shape of Haru’s head across the creature’s smooth back.

Haru takes a seat and waits while the sun slides up the sky. At around eleven o’clock, he’s digging up tiny seashells next to his legs, small fingers brushing aside the warm sand like it’s fine silk. The creature stirs.

“Hello,” Haru hears.

“Hello,” he says.

“I’m Rin,” the creature says - chirps, really.

“Okay,” Haru says. It takes him a few minutes to remember his manners - Rin flips over onto his back and stares up at the sky happily while he does so. “I’m Haru.”

“That’s great, Haru! Do you like to swim?”

Haru shrugs. “What is swimming?”

“How do you live here without knowing what swimming is?”

“But I don’t live here,” Haru tells him. “My parents are here on vacation.”

Rin props himself up on an elbow while his tail beats excitedly against the sand, red and whip-fast. The other people on the beach take no notice. “Swimming is like. Moving through the water. Letting the water know where you want to go, and then getting there. You know?”

“Oh,” Haru says.

“How old are you, Haru?” Rin asks him curiously, reaching out towards his face. His hands are webbed, with hints of bright red scatterd here and there along the bones, and his nails are dark red and sharp. Haru shrinks back, startled.

“Five,” he tells Rin.

“That’s so old,” Rin marvels. “How do you not know how to swim?”

“How old are _you_ , then?”

“I don’t know. Not five, though. Seijuurou is almost five and he’s twice as big as me.”

Haru considers this. Not everything grows like a human boy, so he supposes it makes enough sense.

“Can I show you something?” Rin asks.

“... yeah, sure,” Haru looks out towards the horizon. Noon makes it bright in his eyes, until everything blurs and glows like the line between two worlds.

“Okay! Come on,” and Rin grabs his hand, dragging him into the waves.

-

So the swim team scouts go after Haru and offer him scholarships and other things his parents tell him are good to have in the back of his mind.

Haru shrugs.

He likes swimming, of course, but it doesn’t make any sense when he can’t _go anywhere_. He knows a swimming pool like he knows his own house - knows which wall has a tiny chip in it, knows the way a splash echoes against the windows, the ceiling.

“But what do you _want_ to do,” Sousuke asks him after their tenth conversation about The Future and all that it entails; Sousuke, the pride and darling of Tokitsu, sits at the edge of the pool next to him and their legs dangle in the water. Sousuke keeps touching his shoulder gingerly; it makes Haru wince each time. “What else are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Haru says for what feels like the millionth time. “I don’t want to swim in a pool forever.”

“You’re fast, though,” Sousuke says like it’s all that matters. Haru supposes that it probably is all that matters, to him. Not that it actually matters, since all the pride and all the darling that Sousuke is right now is about to pretty much go to shit. “You’re naturally fast and you pace yourself well. And it feels good to win, doesn’t it?”

Haru shrugs again.

“Doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really feel anything.”

Sousuke’s reaction is something Haru expects - anger, exasperation. They’ve been through this so many times that it’s tiring for Haru to go through all the motions again; Sousuke remains the only person who won’t stop _bothering_ him about it. “Why are you even _here_ , then? You’re just this ball of wasted potential, aren’t you?”

Wasted. Haru swallows; it tastes bitter, so he flings the next words out like whips.

“Better wasted than exhausted, I would say,” he snaps. Sousuke’s jaw tightens.

“Fuck you, Nanase,” he mutters darkly.

“I’m not a waste.”

“Then prove it,” Sousuke demands, “prove it to Coach or the people over the phone that _I_ have to answer to every day to tell them that you’re busy. Stop sitting around being indecisive, entrance exams are in _a month_.”

“Why do I have to decide so soon, then?” Haru tosses out. “We have the rest of our lives in front of us, don’t we?”

“What are you going to do after we graduate, then?”

Haru huffs in frustration. “I don’t know.”

“They’re not going to wait for you forever.”

“Yeah. What are _you_ going to do, then? You can’t keep your shoulder hidden forever.”

It’s a low blow, and Haru knows it when the fight goes out of Sousuke, leaving him listless, feet bobbing in the buoyancy of the water. The smell of chlorine seems to stick to Haru physically as he watches Sousuke pull himself back together. “I’ll figure it out. I might go back to the coast for a while.”

“ _You’re_ already scouted,” Haru points out. He doesn’t add _but not for long_ , because Sousuke already hears it.

“Aren’t we a pair,” Sousuke says grimly.

Haru stares out one of the long windowpanes. The sun’s setting, lighting the sky up red. He thinks about Rin whenever he sees it, about the day they spent in the middle of the ocean, catching currents and letting the waves toss them up into the sky until it got dark and Rin had to drag him back to shore, an insatiably curious human boy.

Haru only has one goal at Tokitsu, and it’s not speed - it’s stamina.

“I’m here because I like swimming,” he says, quietly. “That’s all.”

-

So eventually, Sousuke decides to go back to the coast.

“I’m not going to university,” he says, something bitter twisting his in his voice.

Haru sat through the entrance exam with his other classmates, but couldn’t concentrate through a good portion of them. He’d been thinking about the trips he took to the sea when he was younger, before his life became about swimming to win, going meaningless laps back and forth along the length of the pool. At some point he thought about the way he brushed the water aside, how it made way for him.

_Swimming is about letting the water know where you want to go_.

“Sousuke,” Haru asks, carefully, “where exactly are you from?”

“Iwatobi… why?”

“Can I visit you sometime?”

Sousuke laughs for a while before Haru grows annoyed. “Sorry? You want to visit me?”

“We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“We’re _roommates_ ,” Sousuke corrects him. “I thought you weren’t interested in friends.”

“I’m not. But it’s not like I can help it.” They look at each other for a few minutes before Sousuke breaks out into a more genuine smile, a little smug around the edges, but a little helpless, too.

“Why would you want to visit me, anyway?”

“I want to see the ocean,” Haru shrugs.

“Take a bus, Nanase, the beach is only an hour away,” Sousuke suggests lightly, turning away, but Haru isn’t finished. Heat rises to his face, desperate and sudden - he wants to see _the_ ocean. With _that_ beach.

“What do you _want_ to do?” he hears himself asking, his hand shooting out to brush Sousuke’s arm.

“Something I can’t,” Sousuke says.

“What?”

“I...want to be a doctor. Medicine.”

“You want to study medicine?”

“You want to swim,” Sousuke points out. “So what?”

“What do you do at home, then?”

“My dad’s a fisherman,” Sousuke says, slowly, and Haru thinks - _that’s it_.

-

So the color of the ocean is not blue, Haru discovers, and ledgers are not red enough. Trees aren’t as green as they look in postcards and the clouds in the sky are tainted with the fingerprints of the rest of the world, yellow sunlight and grey with heaviness.

Even so, when Sousuke makes a grand gesture towards the water, Haru takes a step forwards and sets himself free.

-

So the way it works is like this:

Haru familiarizes himself with the sea. He wakes up early in the morning and helps Sousuke’s father get the nets ready; spends the day smoothing out edges, the afternoons studying maps and weather patterns and safety and legal regulations. On his days off he idles on the beach, sometimes, or goes upstairs to see Sousuke studying, looking through textbooks so intensely that it makes Haru smile.

Sousuke helps Haru study, too, and then end up trading terms at each other over dinner, and again in the evenings when Sousuke feels like taking a walk outside, sea breeze ruffling their hair and their loose shirts.

Haru doesn’t worry a lot about being able to survive in the water. When he goes swimming, Yamazaki-san has Sousuke go along to make sure he doesn’t get out too far.

Sousuke swims too, sometimes, although he spends more time with flash cards than he does by the ocean.

Haru writes to Tokyo. He writes to his parents; they don’t reply for months. He goes on his first trip with Sousuke’s father and comes back to a few postcards, pictures of his parents in charming little towns, empty and cheerful messages scrawled onto the side.

It’s actually not bad, spending days on a rippling mirror of the sky with Sousuke’s rough but kind father. He learns to weather storms and lounge along the stern like he remembers in the books. The muscles in his arms harden; his skin tans.

“You guys could be brothers,” people would say when they run into Haru and Sousuke sometimes, “are you sure you’re not brothers?”

Sousuke shrugs. “We could be, yeah.”

Next to him, Haru’s face is faintly amused.

He supposes he and Sousuke _could_ be brothers, if that’s what people think - they live in the same house, do chores, help each other study, and spend evenings on the beach. Haru starts talking one evening, home from a turbulent journey; he tells Sousuke about the beach he visited when he was five, the one he’s sure is close to here. He tells Sousuke about a boy with a sparkling red tail who lives far away in the middle of the ocean.

“Everything makes a hell of a lot more sense,” Sousuke says when he’s finished his story. “So what happened to him?”

“I don’t know. He’s still there, I guess.”

“And you’re gonna go find him.”

Haru thinks about it for the next week. Now that he’s actually _here_ , it feels weirdly like he’s farther away from Rin. He doesn’t even know if Rin is actually still around, if he’s around _anywhere_.

“If you’re still looking for him after all these years, he’s probably pretty fucking important,” Sousuke says after a week of what Haru suspects is moping. Sousuke didn’t have any trouble at all accepting Rin’s existence. Maybe that’s where the friendship part comes in. Maybe Sousuke is the one who believed in him this whole time.

“He is,” Haru says, “really important. He’s the only one who’s given me the means to go back to him.”

“Then he’s probably waiting for you,” Sousuke rolls his eyes. “So?”

-

So one sunrise in May the tide rises, and when the water peels away from the sand Haru nods to himself, and follows.

-

Rin touches their foreheads together ecstatically, so it feels more like he’s physically knocking all the exhaustion out of Haru’s body, but Haru doesn’t really mind.

“Hello,” Rin whispers, his lips brushing Haru’s cheek.

“Hello,” Haru answers back.

He’s twenty years old now, no longer a startlingly fast boy riding the current of the water but just an ordinary man, and Rin looks - magnificent, his body strong and broad and his bare skin warm under the coolness of the water. His hair billows out with the current and his eyes sparkle and Haru doesn’t think twice when he tilts his head and presses their lips together, feeling like he’s spent a whole lifetime missing this, feeling immensely human about it all.

“You went away,” Rin says after, prodding at his own mouth curiously.

“You grew up.”

“You could have sent a message, or something.”

“You didn’t have to wait all this time -”

Underwater, Rin’s face is luminous. Haru thinks his face is probably shadowed. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters when Rin looks at him like he’s the only light shining in a dark cave. Rin is beautiful, Haru thinks, the wonder and happiness on his face almost painfully familiar.

Their hands link together; they stand still against the current.

“You came back,” and Rin tilts his head back, his laughter scattering like sunbeams in the depths of the sea.

 

.

.

 

**end**.


End file.
